Hollywood Utopia

60 Hollywood Utopia
Nonetheless, such otherwise superficial ecological texts at least expose a range of
utopic issues, even if they rarely create the screen space necessary to fully develop
many of the implications of such a discourse.
Because films like Medicine Man remain overtly didactic and outwardly ecological
in their thematic concerns, they continue to work within existing socio-political
systems rather than promote a more holistic and radically deeper form of ecological
expression. Nevertheless, though the potent evocation of nature imagery may
appear crude to ‘sophisticated’ viewers, it helps consolidate and dramatise inherent
ecological and human conflicts. In Emerald Forest the (post)colonial clash of
cultures is strongly visualised by the foregrounded image of a ‘naturalised’ Charlie
climbing the outside of his father’s apartment block in his quest to save his people.
The incongruity of his ascent, which is more usually associated with conquering a
‘primitive’ natural obstacle, serves in this example to dramatise the clash of these
mutually opposing cultures while also becoming metaphorically and visually
resonant over and above the diegetic requirements of the text. Urban
sophistication and architecture counterpoint the more primal and primitive beauty
of the forest.
Jerry Mander simplistically suggests that such sequences and films attempt to
show white people from the point of view of natives. The native Americans call the
whites ‘the termite people’ because of how they destroy the forest. As a
consequence, white society conjures up the ‘dead world’ because of the concrete
environment it creates where nothing grows (Mander 1992: 225). How to represent
native indigenous peoples in Hollywood film is always problematic. If presented as
radically different, with their ‘otherness’ fully articulated, scriptwriters often
presume western mass audiences would not respond, much less understand.
Consequently their representation becomes more uniformly like Walt Disney’s
anthropomorphic ‘human’ animals and even caricatured as two-dimensional and
thereby either appealing or repulsive to audiences. Hence they remain typecast as
exotic and alien or idyllically innocent and primitive.
This criticism can most readily be appreciated through the almost obligatory
ritualised and idyllic scenes of native nubile bodies bathing and grooming, as
evidenced in many western romantic paintings of nature. Old wrinkled bodies are
rarely if ever displayed in films of ‘primitive’ societies, which are linked to the erotic
evocation of easy and available sexuality through the promotion of exotic rites-ofpassage
rituals. Fatimah Tobing Ront (1996) speaks of the ‘Rousseauesque study’
of remaining ‘primitive peoples which have survived as a taxidermic mode of
ethnographic cinema’ that began with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North
(1922). Yet in many of the films mentioned above, and especially in the extremely
successful Dances with Wolves (1990), to be discussed in detail in the following
chapter, concessions are made to the native culture’s unique, authentic language,